CS: Places that "were" (is there a verb to express a past that is always present?) the theatres of the worst possible violence MUST be reused.....There is no excuse of this being the outcome of capitalistic consumerism.....no, no, no.....to reuse it as a memorial would be even worst! We got it as it is and what it is is the fact that it is! This is a forensic evidence!! Do you want to use it as a memorial? Fantastic, let's keep it clean so that it can be reused forever even for the worst! Do you want to demolish it? Fine. This is even worst because it confirms the possible reiteration of the action of building, to demolish eventually, to build again......
I remember our truncated discussion on the church of the massacre......
Shall we call this: the UN-bearable lightness (banality) of violence? Because in a logic of oppositions between good and bad, they both have the same exact weight for this place that now works so well as a shopping center and before was the vestibule of the massacre of life! Someone even had the sarcasm of using the same characters used for Arbeit Macht Freit and Benvenue Moin Moin. Yes, we have to pint out at the contronimic and palindromic nature of the building. This is its (our) hubris and its (our) curse!!!!
Don't we have to take a position in front of this inevitable destiny: yes, you/we must continue to reuse that space. Certain (if not all) errors cannot be erased. This is the evil of building. Do we realize that we have been catastrophically overbuilding???Once it is built, it is built (for joy and sorrow), and we have to spend the rest of our time in front of it, apologising for its arrogance, the arrogance of being what it is (finally we made it!), the arrogance of thinking that this evidence is not true....that we have no responsibility for a bad fatality because we did our best to tune and sympathise but unfortunately something went wrong..........or even if everything went wrong but now we can fix it....
But don't we even know how to apologize? So full of pride as we are, thinking that if the intentions were good the building will be good and if the intentions were bad the building will be bad.
We are still intoxicated by this logic of modernism: it is what it is.
Let's try to be faithful to the meaning of this pompous word that we use: archi-tect, and see if we can point out the nakedness of this kingdom of which we are certainly the accomplices if not the hidden orchestrators (like the ridiculous architect evoked in the movie The Matrix)! I think that if we dare to know the archè we will be much more careful and thread as softly as we can on this world.
Maybe I am getting so extreme because I am in Lebanon now! But what is the aim of this folly: to build it all?
I even thought about this hypothesis: let's try to build everything, absolutely everything, in order to witness the waste and the decay for having built that which we will never have the possibility to inhabit.....
AN:
it is very hard for many of us to understand the pain and suffering of the victim of any form of violence. whatever they build will be questioned and whatever they demolish will be questioned. it's best not to touch it like the Roman ruins let it decay and crumble to itself. or demolition and designated the entire site as heritage or unbuildable territory. there are mixed political issues here that article is also questioning some very successful architects .... but from where I stand as an outsider completely disassociated from the history of the building. I think it is a beautiful building complex corridors the court yeard absolutely enjoyable to live there but now that I know the building history it has turned into a bitter almond. imagine eating a bag of almonds and one little bitter almond will ruin the joy and pleasure of all the other sweet almonds you just had.
the architecture association of Europe should be vigilant of such proposals and immediately issue a memo to all listed members of RIBA or whatever other organizations architect affiliate themselves to, not to participate in the proposals etc...
CS: I am going to visit Baalbek and I have begun to think about it. As you wrote - and as the Gestapo Headquarters could be according to "your" proposal - Baalbek is a heritage site full of beautiful/horrendous ruins (who knows who was sacrificed there? A detail to be removed from memory). It is a perfect representation of the human folly's project to make an "it". The more conspicuous the "it" is the better it is. This is what the books on tectonics are full of. We keep using it as touristic site after it being reused in thousands of different ways for millennia. The tourists' attractions are simply our "innocent" (perverse) way to not know how to deal with the conspicuous evidence of stuff that can be this or that, for the good or for the bad, a fully realized palindrome. Tourism (like tourism at Dachau or Auschwitz) is a way of embalming the evidence. But tourism (for joy or for sorrow) is a full use, a user with a full content. Like museification, it comes with a paraphernalia that is terrific. Like in your little duck memorial.
The so-called "Stone of the Pregnant Woman" says it all: we have cut and lift a stone that we do not know how to carry around unless through an apparatus that seems pure folly now as it was then. There is no archaic innocence. The folly was so immense them as it is now. We have to inhabit "it". This is why we invented tourism and its international promotion: we have to continue to live "the building". This is what "the building" demands. The first builders know this very well from the very beginning, they knew they were committing definitely to this hubris: what a commitment! The Romans were masters in compromising the life of others into pure acts of construction. I was walking around Byblos realizing that there are granite Roman columns everywhere! They were probably the counterweight for boats that had to carry goods away. This is the way they were cursing a place. Not that making all these columns to explode, to disintegrate them, would be a "final solution" (see the terrorism at Palmira). I am sorry the milk has been spilled.....we have to try to fix it, and to fix it is to live it fully. To inhabit the Gestapo Headquarters with a shopping mall, Baalbek with tourism or these ruinous Lebanese apartment blocks with Sirian refugees paradoxically makes all the "little" differences we are up to. But the design that we are fulfilling must be evident. If we pretend to be architects: those who know the principles of this tectonics (if not technics all-together).
I am an anti-nihilist, anti-relativist, so I do not accept this ......
I have been educated to build. This is quite a contradiction. Even more, emphasised by the fact that I am into architecture education!!! Marcel Mauss and then Bataille (and with them Ivan Illich and many others and a lot of great friends I have had the chance to meet in my life) point out very, very well the direction that we should take, the reality that we must construct, this contronymic nature of this embarrassing "ornament" (something that has been added and cannot be erased) we have to cope with. I am not for the hope in a different future but for a meaningful present. We have to stop building and start the ritual of "consumption": the altars are ready and all the goods to be sacrificed have been accumulated out of proportion. Global statistics forecast already incomprehensible quantities. Someone called this perspective "degrowth". I am not convinced about the term. A recent book has an interesting title "Global Burnout". It reminds me of the potlatch ritual.
This life is an embarrassing gift. It has always been like this. This is an eternal truth. How do we reciprocate this gift? Where does it come from? Who is the offerer? In Crete, it took the semblance of a huge beautiful bull. We know something about this story. Its epigones are our evidence.
We have to start to live all these contronyms (gifts/curses). This is what I can say. This is a very complicated task that demands all our possible commitment. A lot of work. So immense is this Babel (not by chance one of Marco's last drawings at his death's threshold). How are we going to dwell all this building? Is there a thought capable of all this? Well, we are committed to it! There no outside from this labyrinth, no thread that leads to its center, no flying out. We have to bear the immense heaviness of this precariousness.
Let's see how can we inhabit this archè.